Khalif Wyatt picks up game, Temple survives Charlotte challenge

PHILADELPHIA -- This was the offense Fran Dunphy envisioned at the beginning of the season, balanced and efficient.

The only complaint Dunphy about his team's offensive performance after Temple escaped with an 89-88 victory over Charlotte Wednesday night at the Liacouras Center is that he would have liked to have seen a few more assists.

The Owls had 17 helpers on 31 buckets. Other than that, though, Dunphy was happy with the way the Owls (15-7 overall, 4-4 Atlantic 10) played -- and he had a right to be pleased.

Leading scorer Khalif Wyatt overcame a slow start to lead four players in double figures with a game-high 25 points. He scored 18 of those points in the second half.

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Jake O'Brien, a transfer from Boston University, added a season-high 22 points off the bench. The 6-9 graduate student was nearly perfect from the field, shooting 8-for-10 overall and 4-for-5 from 3-point range. O'Brien came up huge in the first half when Wyatt could not shake the relentless defense of Charlotte guard Denzel Ingram. O'Brien had 14 points in the opening 20 minutes to help the Owls salvage a draw in the first half.

Another transfer, Dalton Pepper, had his best offensive game of the season. He added 11 points and two assists off the bench in 18 solid minutes. Meanwhile, Chester All-Delco Rahlir Hollis-Jefferson also scored 11 points and had a season-high five steals.

As far as defense, we'll let Dunphy put this game in proper perspective.

"It was one of those games where neither team was very good on the defensive end," he said.

Temple's effort on defense certainly had Dunphy scratching his head. The Owls were awful. There's no other way to put it. It was the second-most points the Owls have allowed this season and the third time in the last six games that Temple has surrendered at least 81 points.

The biggest problem came around the basket. For the second straight game Temple had problems defending the paint. The 49ers (17-5, 5-3) scored half of their points in the paint, which is how this game stayed so close even though the Owls jumped out to an 18-5 lead.

"Our defense really needs a lot of work," Dunphy said. "We have to do our work early on the post-up guys. We're struggling with that and then we threw the ball away a number of times. We had a guy fall down. We had a guy catch and bobble it and we have another guy throw the ball away. That's not normally what we do. We just got enough to get by tonight because obviously we're not playing great basketball at this point. We have to find a way to get our defense much more solid."

Forward Chris Braswell burned the Owls for 23 points on 7-for-11 shooting from the field and 9-for-10 sniping from the free-throw line. Guard Pierria shot 5-for-7 for 14 points and forward Darion Clark was 5-for-8 and finished with 13 points.

"Teams are shooting high percentage against us because they're not shooting jump shots," Wyatt said. "They're powering it inside. If you shoot a lot of shots in there, you're going to make a lot of shots."

The 49ers made shots, lots of them, to climb out of that 13-point hole in the first half and nearly erase a 10-point deficit in the final three minutes. Charlotte also took care of some sloppy play by the Owls down the stretch to make the crowd of 4,785 sweat it out.

Temple turned the ball over five times in its last 10 possessions. The 49ers capitalized on that carelessness to get within 88-85 with 27 seconds to play.

"We didn't handle their pressure too well down the stretch and I take a lot of blame for that," Wyatt said. "Some decisions I made were bad. We were sloppy ... but we'll learn from it. No one has pressed like that so it was new."

The Owls were lucky because the 49ers could not capitalize on all of Temple's mistakes. Henry missed a 3-pointer with 20 seconds left that could have tied it. Hollis-Jefferson missed two foul shots that could have clinched it for Temple with 11 ticks left, but the ball went out of bounds off the 49ers.

Wyatt made the front end of a two-shot foul to give the Owls an 89-85 lead, which was huge when Henry buried a triple at the buzzer to give the Owls a much-needed win going into Saturday's game at Dayton. The Flyers knocked off Saint Joseph's Wednesday night.

Expect much of the emphasis in practice to be on defense.

"We're not a very good defensive team at this point," Dunphy said. "We need to get it back a little bit."